61–70 of 217 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't downvote you, but WhatsApp affects more people than obscure scientific research.
If it wasn't for obscure scientific research, WhatsApp wouldn't exist.
It doesn't mean that obscure scientific research has the same market value as almost everything.
Why does MIT require funding from the NIH? Isn't this what endowmnets and tuition is for? Imaginge of google or GE hired people and forced them to raise money from the federal government to actually build their next project? Notwithstanding the mis-appropriation of the profits, purely from a managerial perspective this is highly flawed.
The flipside is also true, Universities are sturctured to leverage outside capital rather than their own (despite having gobs of it). MIT has $11B in the bank, they are not desperate for cash. To do "science", or otherwise.
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There's already a tax on that $18 billion, it's at least a capital gains tax of 20% (not to mention the income taxes on all the attorney's, accountants, etc... involved in the deal). You just need to fix the allocation of the tax dollars.
That's only on cash dividends, selling equity, income on shorting, etc, right? The actual transfer of equity isn't taxed, at least until they try to pull cash out.
Yet another worrying sign is that at my university (and I've heard similar stories from colleagues at others) is now deciding that instead of hiring 2 or 3 junior faculty positions (new academics straight out of a postdoc into their first faculty job), instead the priority is to spend the same money on one mid-career "poach" from a competing institution. Double the salary, and bigger startup package. Their rationale…
These kinds of things are daily discussions in laboratories all over the world. Everyone knows there's no future in academia, and so everyone is looking for an exit plan. I actively discourage people from doing a PhD. Academia is a horrible feudalistic system that doesn't pay well enough to keep the bright minds it attracts. There is no sense in being a post-doc for life. Much better to take that hedge fund job. The…
i wish it was just the money. when i went into the university i was hoping to find people like me. it attracts bright minds, but it doesn't encourage them in any sort of way. a bright mind in that system is worth "almost" the same as the average joe who studied enough to pass through the system. so we're there, scattered, with no means to find each other. some of them do so anyway, it's what keeps them put up with th…
When I chose where to study (for undergrad), a major factor in the decision was minimizing the amount of coursework I would have to repeat.
However, one aspect of being a professor has been terrifying me for over five years now – the uncertainty of getting funding from NIH. No let me rephrase that. What is terrifying is the near-certainty that any grant I submit would be rejected. I have been waiting for the funding situation to improve, but it seems to only be getting worse. I personally know about ten scientists who have become professors in the last 3…
Because research nowadays is very expensive. Seventy years ago you could win the Nobel Prize with a cyclotron half a meter in diameter, nowadays you need the LHC at CERN to do that. And it isn't just high-energy physics, it's biology, chemistry, even computer science. Big data requires big storage.
Research grants go to research and upkeep of facilities (the dreaded indirect costs), tuition and endowment is for salaries, building projects and startup grants.
It's accepted that the mission of universities is to conduct research on behalf of the taxpayer, and that these results are public. Google is not serving the taxpayer, and that's why what falls out of their research is a trade secret.
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You can write a superficial clone of any web app. But can you handle 8000 tweets/sec in real-time? The innovation is in the back-end.
It's been done notoriously badly at Twitter, no offense if you are an employee. Sure it's gotten better since they switched to the JVM, but still scaling to that size has been done by hundreds of companies now. Once there are textbooks out describing the techniques, you are simply implementing known methodologies with perhaps a few customizations and tweaks. I don't really see much innovation there TBH.
Not to sound like some crazy person with the word SOCIALIST written on the inside of my forehead in neon colors, but: It should be possible for WhatsApp to get "only" $18 billion and scientific research gets the remaining $1 billion. About a 5% tax. That way, venture capitalists could claim to fund innovation and would actually be truth-tellers.
Oh give me a break.
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Fastest. Downvote. Ever. \o/
Why? What would be the problem with taxing large acquisitions? It seems relatively painless and with little dead-weight loss compared to other taxes.
Currently we just let politicians spend it as they see fit.
These kinds of things are daily discussions in laboratories all over the world. Everyone knows there's no future in academia, and so everyone is looking for an exit plan. I actively discourage people from doing a PhD. Academia is a horrible feudalistic system that doesn't pay well enough to keep the bright minds it attracts. There is no sense in being a post-doc for life. Much better to take that hedge fund job. The…
i wish it was just the money. when i went into the university i was hoping to find people like me. it attracts bright minds, but it doesn't encourage them in any sort of way. a bright mind in that system is worth "almost" the same as the average joe who studied enough to pass through the system. so we're there, scattered, with no means to find each other. some of them do so anyway, it's what keeps them put up with th…